free range might be hiding eggs ?

[Bear Foot Farm]

Most of the time you can pen them up for a few days and they will learn to start using the nest boxes

 

[Barn Maid Ann]

We started getting eggs from this years batch of pullets back in November. We only got one or two here or there. Then in Dec it started snowing. The whole flock became pretty much barn-bound for a week or more. Oh my, we were inundated with eggs, suddenly.
I had had a sneaking suspicion that they were hiding eggs out in the woods where they liked to hang out. But I don't have time to look in the morning before work, and it is dark by the time I get home. If the preditors haven't gotten them, I bet there are still a bunch of eggs all around out there. The snow has come and gone and come again. But I think more of the hens have habituated to laying in the nest boxes now, so even if they are free ranging, they seem to be coming back in to lay their eggs, thankfully.
Now we get at least 8 to 10 a day out of the 13 young hens.

 

[Wildsky]

Quote:

How handy is that, just leave an egg carton out and perhaps they'll fill that too!

 

[LilBizzy]

I had 2 that would escape the run every day. I felt like they must have been laying. I tried following the one, and lookng everywhere. Finally, one day, I sat outside for almost an hour following her around before she snuck into a small run down, falling apart shed in my neighbors yard. Behind the pile of junk in there,in the back corner, was a pile of 13 eggs.
I marked her( to be able to tell her from the rest), and kept her locked up for a few days till she laid in the nestbox.
Now the other one- I don't know. There was an egg in the nestbox once, and for a month later there wasn't one. I have looked all over my yard, and my neighbors yards, and cannot find a pile of eggs. So it is possible she wasn't laying any. Or it's possible they are trickier than I give them credit for.

 

[rooster0209]

I found a whole pile of eggs in a 5gal pail that was half burried behind the work shop. I knew those darn bantie hens were laying somewhere.

I put a ground nest in the coop and covered it w/a board. They prefer that to my nesting boxes. If I'd known that, it would have saved me and DH lots of time by not building the darn things

 

[alagary]

thanks folks ! I have 30 acres here so i guess I have a lot of looking to do .

 

[alagary]

I been everywhere . i guess I should leave them in the coop a couple of days . I hate to do it because they seem to have so much fun in the yard . will this help the hiders to start to use the nests ?

 

[lori925]

We have nine girls and just last week about half of them started hiding their eggs - we've found two places so far - one is in an old day shed..My DH took the hay bales out of the shed and now it's just empty and no one has laid in there since. I only know who one of the guilty girls is. The other place we found is the weeds - we saw which girl was guilty on that location, but they were all hanging out in the shed so no telling who that was - in 3 days time, we found about a dozen eggs there.

If we try not opening the barn up until noon and find that works, does that mean we will have to keep them cooped up until noon everyday or do we just do that until they are laying in the barn in their nesting boxes consistently?

thanks in advance.
Lori